The Ill-Made Knight

by Christian Cameron

  I was in the castle of Meaux for five days. I had six wounds – Jean de Viladi swears to them, and who am I to complain? I was much doted on by the ladies, and one lady in particular. I worried I’d be poisoned, but the Captal assured me that this was not the French way.

  As far as the ladies were concerned, I’d ridden into the Jacques, first of all the knights, and cut my way through. I hope the irony of this wasn’t lost on the man who cut my reins. The bastard.

  For two nights – two beautiful, sin-filled nights – Emile came to my room, but on the third night, she came with another woman, who would not leave, and on the fourth night, she didn’t come at all. Instead, the Princess came.

  I tried to bow, and she came to my bedside and smiled somewhat hesitantly. She put a hand on my hand. ‘Monsieur,’ she said. ‘My husband will return tomorrow from Burgundy, and with him comes a great army to smash this rebellion – and take Paris, too.’ She smiled bravely. ‘I will leave it to him to reward you as you deserve for coming to our defence,’ she said. She smiled, then frowned and looked around the room, as if for support.

  I knew some of the language of chivalry. ‘I need no reward but your thanks, my lady,’ I said. ‘I hope that you feel I did justice to your favour?’

  She flushed. ‘Monsieur, I was very foolish to give you such a thing, and I must ask for its return.’ She had the good grace to look ashamed.

  Well, to have a favour revoked is . . . not a good thing.

  ‘Send Perkin for it. It is attached to my helmet,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry if I . . . disappointed you.’ Really, what could I say? English squires don’t chat with Princesses, much less task them.

  She looked at me under her lashes – not flirtatiously, but more questioningly. ‘Ah, Monsieur, you were never disappointing. But this has become a matter too elevated for me. Or you.’ She leaned forward slightly. ‘A certain person is leaving – with her husband. She wishes to send her . . . farewell. Yes? And I cannot be seen to favour you. I’m sorry. My honour is engaged.’ She leaned back.

  ‘Please tell the certain person . . .’ I said.

  She turned her head away. ‘Monsieur, you cannot imagine I would carry messages between you.’

  By the head of St John! I had imagined that very thing. She inclined her head graciously, and as I couldn’t bow, I took her hand.

  She allowed it, and I felt something hard in my hand. She nodded and left the room.

  I had a ring – a very beautiful ring in gold and enamel.

  I was still shaking my head when the Captal entered with Perkin. ‘Can you ride?’ he asked.

  I nodded.

  He pursed his lips. ‘I’m on my way to the King of Navarre. I think I’d best take you with me. There’s a nasty little rumour making the rounds in this castle. It might cost you your neck.’

  I looked away. ‘I’d be honoured to travel with you, my lord,’ I said. ‘But I was sent by the Lieutenant of Gascony to get a safe conduct signed by the Dauphin, and I fear it is my duty to wait on him.’

  The Captal nodded. ‘Let me have it,’ he said. ‘I’ll see that it is signed today – they owe you that – but I promise you, my young faux Gascon, that if you sleep alone here, you won’t wake up.’

  I must have flushed. I know I straightened up in bed and said, ‘But she’s gone, and her stinking husband with her!’

  The Captal shook his head. ‘My young scapegrace, no one cares about the state of your amours with the lady in question. The Dauphin has been told that you, ahem, slept with his wife.’ He shrugged. ‘These things happen. It will all blow over in a few years.’

  We travelled south to Paris across a landscape dotted with peasants and Parisians swinging from trees. In some places, we passed manor houses burned to the ground – at one road junction, I saw two Parisian ‘hoods’ swinging in the wind, rotting away, and just a few yards further down the road, a young nobleman’s corpse was being pecked by ravens – the corpse, you understand, was a few days older, and had yet to be cut down.

  The roads of the Beauvais were packed with refugees, and the refugees were themselves from different sides. There were noble refugees, clinging to their few remained valuables or hollow-eyed with torment – some noble women with their children, looking as if they had endured more than they could bear. And peasant women, in much the same state, but with fewer possessions. And then peasants with their men folk – these the victims of the English and Navarrese – the more routine depredations of our professional looters.

  But the French nobles – the remnants of Charles of Navarre’s army, and the great army the Dauphin was bringing from Burgundy – saw all concentrations of refugees as potential gatherings of Jacques and tended to attack them without too much investigation.

  Perhaps it was the fever of my wounds – the ongoing pain in my knee scared me – or the weight of my sins.

  Perhaps it was the children. There were dead children everywhere.

  Christ, even now . . .

  We rode, tight lipped and silent. I wanted to be done with the whole thing, and for the first time in three years, I considered going back to smithing. Knighthood didn’t look very noble in the June of 1358. Can deeds of arms be measured against raped women? Can bravery in battle and loyalty to your lord be weighed against murdered children? Were we supposed to protect these people or not?

  I didn’t even notice where we were going until I could see Paris. I only remember the dead and the blank-eyed, then waking in a stinking pile of straw in a barn outside St Cloud. There was sheep-dip in the straw – it was all I could get.

  Well, that and Richard Musard, who threw his arms around me as soon as I dismounted. ‘Did you get the sauvegardes?’ he asked, ever practical.

  I nodded weakly.

  ‘We’ll be famous!’ he said. Richard had a great deal more confidence in the honour of Princes than I did just then.

  ‘Have you got John?’ asked Sam.

  Richard nodded. ‘I brought him here on a cart; he’s finally on the mend. The wound festered . . .’

  Sam nodded. ‘I want to see him.’

  I wanted to see him, too. The trip had bound us together.

  ‘When did you get to St Cloud?’ I asked.

  Richard shrugged. ‘As soon as I healed up, we were on the road. Sir John Hawkwood has taken good care of me.’

  St Cloud, the very gateway to Paris, had an English garrison, and Sir James Pipe was the captain of it. The King of Navarre was rallying an army – to liberate Paris, or so he said.

  After we visited John Hughes, we put our camp gear with his and made up beds of dirty straw. Sir John Hawkwood himself brought me wine, and news, and Perkin sat on a barrel end, repairing my kit. He found me a pair of leather and splint legs – pretty enough, but heavy and clumsy compared to my beautiful steel pair that didn’t quite fit. With the help of a mercenary armourer, he was fitting the legs to me, while I lay on my dirty straw, getting bitten by insects and considering an end to my career of war.

  I wanted to be interested in Sir John’s news, and I finally asked, ‘If the King of Navarre is making himself captain of Paris, why the hell did he smash the Jacques? Surely they were on the same side?’

  Hawkwood looked away. It was evening, there was a fire burning in the barnyard and Sir John’s twenty or so lances were cooking their food or watching their servants cook. The fire backlit his face and made his expression hard to read.

  ‘I’m not sure whether my employer knows from day to day what he’s doing,’ he admitted. ‘But unlike all the other sides, he pays regularly.’

  ‘How many sides? The Navarrese, the English, the Dauphin, the Parisians, the Jacques – have I left anyone out?’ I asked.

  Hawkwood continued to watch the women by the fire. ‘Well, there’s the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope – and the King of France, in England.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not really jesting – the Pope and the Emperor have their fingers in this dough. The Pope is supposedly working to raise the King’s ransom.’

>   You have to remember that back then, the Pope was a Frenchman who lived in Avignon, not an Italian in Rome. Eh?

  ‘But when Charles of Navarre smashed the Jacques,’ I insisted, ‘he was attacking his own power base.’

  ‘Worse,’ Sir John said. ‘He was helping the Dauphin recruit – even though I understand the Dauphin found it prudent to spend the time in Burgundy, leaving his wife to face the Jacques. Eh bien?’

  Perkin coughed in his hand, and arranged my rolled-up riding cloak as a pillow so I could sit. Then he elevated my right knee, which was less swollen.

  Hawkwood laughed. ‘A pox on your coughing, you rogue. I’ve heard the story and I’m as curious as the next varlet. Did you cuckold the Dauphin?’

  ‘No!’ I said with, I confess, a little too much spirit.

  Sir John smirked. ‘Of course not. But every French knight is looking for you. I promise you, lad, it’s going to be rough on you. Word is she came to your room to thank you and you, ahem, took advantage of her.’

  ‘I was never alone with her,’ I hissed.

  ‘Course you weren’t.’ Sir John grinned. ‘Well, it’s one conquest the French can’t take back, eh?’ He got to his feet and said, ‘I was going to ask you and Sam to join me as a lance – the money is the best it’s ever been – but I think Paris might be a little hot for you this year. Best you go back to Gascony.’

  I all but ground my teeth in frustration. I thought of the knight with the broken arm on the bridge – I’d never seen his face, the bastard, but he was her husband. I’d saved his life, and he’d done this: poisoned the well against me – with words.

  My beautiful deed of arms, ruined by malicious gossip.

  For the first time, I began to hate the French.

  I left the suburbs of Paris a day later, with my knee almost a normal size and my fever abating. I didn’t wear harness for a day, but the woods were full of desperate men, and our second day south of the bridge, Sam put an arrow in a lout by the roadside, and we stopped by the cooling corpse so I could put on the whole harness.

  It wasn’t very pretty any more.

  My breast and back had a dozen creases and a deep pit in the front where I’d taken the bolt on the bridge of Meaux. There was rust darkening the bottom of every crease – the best squire in the world can’t get into the bottom of a crease every day. My left shoulder piece was badly deformed by another crossbow bolt. My helmet had two dozen cuts and nicks, each with a corresponding dent. My beautiful leg armours were gone, replaced by leather and splint – done by an enthusiastic amateur, and a livid blue-purple that didn’t match any other part of my harness. My arm harnesses were still beautiful, although somewhat hacked about. The brazen edging on the elbows had several deep cuts.

  My gauntlets were a book in which you could read every missed parry and botched cover of my last ten months.

  I walked with a limp and I leaned too far to the right when I rode.

  But two armoured men and an armed archer seemed enough to keep the roads empty. We passed the village of the dead – we didn’t go through. The bell tower was silent.

  We didn’t mention our own dead, but we both knew we’d lost men. I won’t say their shades came to our fires, but I will say that I thought about them a great deal, especially Rob, whose death seemed the most unfair.

  There were flowers in fields that should have been tilled, and many, many scavengers in the air and on the ground, peasants who moved silently from field to field, slithering like animals – mere movement, and feral movement at that, along the hedgerows.

  A day north of Tours, we saw a party approaching – half a dozen knights and men-at-arms, with a closed box being carried by two mules, and a cart, and a dozen mounted crossbowmen. We watched them carefully, but I knew the arms – the flag was that of Jehan le Maingre, whom I had last seen being taken prisoner before Poitiers.

  We were the smaller party, and we had only a small flag of truce, which Perkin bore on his spear below the arms of the Prince of Wales. I was minded to ride around them, but Richard was sure we’d get a good reception from such a famous knight, and he rode across the fields to them with Perkin at his side.

  My heart hammered in my chest. I was afraid that at any moment they’d kill him. I had lost any faith I’d ever had in chivalry. I trusted my friends and no one else. I had even been a trifle uneasy with Sir John Hawkwood.

  At any rate, Richard came back quickly, and I could see from his riding that something was wrong. Perkin stuck to him like glue.

  Richard reined in. ‘It’s Le Maingre,’ he said. ‘He demands to fight you. He says it is a matter of honour – a private quarrel – and so, despite his state as a prisoner, he can fight. Or so he says.’

  ‘He’s still a prisoner of the Prince,’ Perkin said. ‘And you, sir, are wounded. You cannot fight him.’

  I shook my head. ‘What the hell? Why does Jehan le Maingre want to fight me?’

  Across the fallow field, 200 paces distant, a shining figure detached from the column and started toward us. His horse’s hooves raised puffs of dust from the field. He was moving quite fast. He had a lance.

  If anger can be read in the way a man rides – and it can – this was rage.

  ‘By the passion of Jesus,’ I swore and seized a lance from Sam. Sam’s face was a study in disinterest and he said just one word.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said.

  But I was tired of Frenchmen and their rules and gossip, so I took my lance – a sharp lance, the type we use in war – and rode at Le Maingre.

  My knee wasn’t bad. I got myself straight on my horse, and I got the lance down and into my lance rest without shaming myself. I steadied the lance and aimed it at the crest of his helmet as I’d been taught, leaned a little forward and touched Goldie with my spurs.

  All in all, it was probably the best run with a lance I’d ever had. I got it all together, and my lance point was on target—

  He smashed me to the ground. I bounced. If I hadn’t had a steel breastplate, I’d have been dead. As it was, my once-beautiful breastplate took a tremendous dent – he hit just a few fingers width from the crossbow bolt – and broke some ribs.

  I was knocked unconscious. Which is just as well, because le Maingre informed Richard Musard that if I’d been conscious, he’d have killed me.

  He took Goldie – that was his right by the law of arms as he’d bested me in single combat – and rode away.

  Young men recover quickly. I did – I was up the next day and riding a plug, while Richard, looking like a lord, rode his magnificent bay. Every man on the road assumed I was his squire.

  My pride took longer to heal. I had put some thought into leaving the life of arms, but now I wanted revenge.

  The difficult part was that I wasn’t sure just who I wanted to take my revenge against.

  It was clear to me that chivalry was a closed company. That the men who lived inside it – at least the French – would use any means, no matter how dishonorable, to exclude outsiders.

  And to be fair, it was equally clear to me that we English used the language of chivalry as a cloak of convenience under which to conduct ruthless war for profit.

  Nothing makes a young man angrier than the discovery that he is not valued, not respected, and that his best efforts are wasted. Wait, I lie. The thing that most angers a young man is the confusion of discovering that the philosophy he allows to govern his actions is a nested set of lies.

  I glowered at every man on the road – I wanted a fight every day, to prove to myself that I wasn’t a loser. Not a fool. Christ, the ease with which le Maingre had put me in the dirt. I really didn’t understand, then, how great was the divide between the competent man-at-arms and the trained man-at-arms.

  I hid from my various moral dilemmas – adulterer, murderer, false knight – if that was possible, and instead concerned myself with my worldly repute. All I could think about as we entered Gascony and rode south along the good roads through the unburned farms was that I’d been
made to look a fool. That I had failed. I had no worth, no preux. And that somewhere in the north, Emile would be told by her smirking husband that I’d been taught manners by a French lord, who’d dropped me in a field like the goldsmith’s apprentice I was.

  So much for giving up a life of arms.

  Richard more than stood by me. Richard probably saved me from hell.

  Every night, we sat at campfires, me with broken ribs and more badly damaged than my scarred and rusting armour. Richard lived in a simpler world. His gentle Jesus was closer, his Virgin Mary was always there for him. He didn’t doubt knighthood; he merely found many men wanting.

  Pardon – he didn’t say any of those things, right out.

  But when we were close to Bordeuax, he handed me a cup of wine. ‘Remember, what you said? When I said I was a slave? And you said you had been a London apprentice?’

  ‘What does that have to do with it?’ I asked. I was entirely surly.

  ‘You said that some day, we’d be knights.’ Musard stared out at the stars for a little while. ‘Did you think it would be easy?’ He leaned forward. ‘They don’t want us, William. They want to keep it all for themselves. The power, the riches, the pretty girls. Even the honour. Honour is like money, William. There’s not really enough of it for everyone. If you’d saved – I don’t know, if you’d saved Sir John Chandos on the bridge – he’s rich enough in honour to let you have some. But this French lord? He isn’t going to let you have any.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s what I’m saying!’ I spat.

  Richard sat back and crossed his legs. ‘If you were a black man who’d come to all this from Spain, you’d have thicker skin, brother. Do you believe in God?’

  ‘Of course! What do you take me for, some heretic?’ I snapped.

  ‘No. But listen.’ He spoke slowly, as if speaking to a child. Which, that night, I was. ‘Do you believe in priests? In the Mass?’ he asked.

  I nodded. ‘Of course. Where’s this going?’

  ‘Yet some priests are foul bastards, lecherous and vile. The Pope is a Frenchman who may be our enemy. That Talleyrand, a cardinal of the church, is hardly living in poverty. People say he’s the richest man in the world.’ Musard shrugged. ‘Bad priests don’t touch the truth of our saviour. Bad knights don’t touch the truth of chivalry.’